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Notes -
New footage of ICE shooter
Forgive another high-level post but the body cam (or cell phone?) footage of the cop who shot has been released by AlphaNews and this may significantly change perceptions of what happened (to those willing to have perceptions changed):
https://x.com/alphanews/status/2009679932289626385?s=46
To my eyes it appears that:
The ICE agent is clearly hit by her car and goes down
The ICE agent was not standing in front of her car but walking from one side to another
The driver’s wife is not passively observing but actively shouting at the agents (this should undermine the idea that the driver and her wife were somehow neutral people accidentally caught up in everything)
Perhaps most importantly, but maybe most open to interpretation, it appears to me that the driver looks directly at the ICE agent before driving forward. From this bodycam angle, her face is clearly shown looking directly ahead where the officer is seconds before she moves her car forward.
I suppose a lot of new interpretations are possible, but to me this video footage clearly debunks several going interpretations I have seen proposed. At the very least, maybe reasonable people can agree that the cop did not shoot the driver in cold blood from the side window.
I would also not be surprised to see the idea spread that this new video is AI.
Edit: per corrections from others below, this is not bodycam but cell phone footage (my mistake as it’s clearly even labeled as such) and this explains why it tumbles at the end of the video. Thanks!
I don't find this video particularly clarifying.
I am generally avoiding the discourse around this because I find it so tiresomely tribal and bad-faith on all sides. Rightists screeching that of course Good had it coming for (rationalizations/justifications-but-basically-because-she's-Other-Tribe), leftists screeching that this was murder because (ICE-is-fascist).
It's remarkable that people can look at very short video clips and conclude very firmly and confidently what was in the minds of both the driver and the ICE agent(s). I've watched all the videos from various angles and I have opinions, but I do not think anyone can honestly claim they know what the intentions, state of mind, or even level of awareness of any of the parties involved was. I think it's entirely possible that any of the following could be true (though I have opinions about their relative probability, I do not believe anyone who claims certainty, I think you're just matching your priors to a convenient conclusion):
(a) Good was intentionally trying to run the ICE agent over.
(b) Good panicked and hit the accelerator without thinking.
(c) Good was just trying to drive away and didn't even register there was an agent in the way.
(d) The ICE agent legitimately believed he was in mortal danger and shot someone he thought was trying to kill him.
(e) The ICE agent was a poorly-trained thug who shot a woman who defied his authority.
(f) This was a tragedy with no bad guys, Good panicked in a situation she shouldn't have been in, the ICE agent reacted on an adrenaline dump.
(f) Other variations.
Before your knee flexes and you start slamming your keyboard to argue any of these points, read again what I said: all of these are possible. I am not saying they are all equally likely. But if you say no, (a) or (b) or (c) or (f) are impossible or implausible, you're not being honest. You don't know. You can't read anyone's mind and you can't analyze what was going in in a split-second of video from "eye contact" or a swerve or which direction someone jumped or what someone shouts or mutters.
I have concluded that almost everyone (including our Motte effort-posters) forms a conclusion based not on actually trying to analyze videos and consider evidence, but rather, how they feel about ICE, ICE protesters, immigrants, and Trump. You probably think it was a good shoot if you hate immigrants and lesbian protesters, and you'd think it was a good shoot if there was video of the ICE agent literally walking up behind her and shooting her in the back of the head. You probably think it was a bad shoot if you hate Trump and ICE, and you'd think it was a bad shoot if there was video of Good shouting "I'm going to kill you!" before gunning it straight at a group of ICE screaming for her to stop.
Two observations about this particular video:
Look, you drive a car directly at a cop while they're yelling at you to stop, you're gonna get shot. The footage doesn't change this. ICE is probably not the shining example of highly professional policing, but there's no police agency that wouldn't have shot her. Yes, she may have been trying to escape rather than kill him, but it doesn't change anything in practice. This woman made a very stupid decision and died for it.
Honestly, I think they may be in the top 10%. Every time I hear about an atrocity and can find evidence, the worst I see is them being normal cop-aggressive. The big exception is when I heard about them shooting a reporter with a beanbag round. Turned out that happened... but it was actually LAPD, not ICE.
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Agreed. And?
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Let's say that Good was intentionally trying to run over the ICE agent and that the ICE agent legitimately believed in he was in mortal danger and shot someone he thought was trying to kill him. I don't think either claim is likely, but let's grant them for the sake of argument. I still don't think that justifies the shooting for two reasons, each of which is enough on its own to make a self-defence claim untenable.
The first is that shooting her could not have reasonably been expected to stop the car. He's right in front of it and as we saw in the other videos, it already had enough momentum to continue until she crashed into another car. That's only the first shot too. The second and third were fired from the side. He's not justified in shooting her to stop an imminent threat if it is unreasonable for him to think the shots might stop the imminent threat. And if I understand the law correctly, each shot has to be justified on its own. The second two shots cannot be justified on the grounds that the firing started when there was an imminent threat.
The second reason is that he went against his police training and placed himself in harm's way. I believe this goes against the training provided by the Department of Homeland Security. My understanding of the law is that you lose your right to claim self-defence if you wrecklessly put yourself into the dangerous situation that left yourself no option but to use deadly force.
It seems to me that any self-defence claim has to argue that it's reasonable for the ICE agent to make a poor split second decision about the risk the car posed because of how little time he had to think about it, while somehow not undermining the claim that it was reasonable for him to walk in front of the vehicle that he had so much trouble assessing the danger of. If it's inherently difficult to make a split second decision about whether the vehicle poses an imminent threat sufficient to justify killing the driver, that makes it all the more unreasonable to walk in front of the car in the first place. If it was reasonable to walk in front of the car and pull out his gun when it started moving, then he had to have been confident in his ability to make split second decisions that accurately determined the risk posed by the car moving towards him.
Even granting for the moment that this is true, there is not, in fact, an exception in self defense for futility.
A person defending themselves is not necessarily required to re-evaluate after each act. The three shots were fired within one second, during which he was hit by the vehicle. This applies to civilians in anti-gun states, even -- it was a point in the Bernie Goetz trial.
Even if true, this would not defeat self defense.
There's no such law, even in Minneapolis.
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Keeping your assumptions, she attacked a cop with a lethal weapon. Don't do that :shrug:
Why did she think resisting arrest was smart? Fight in court.
Anything about him walking in front of the car... They were arresting her, what else were they supposed to do? Politely ask her from 10 feet away and say darn when she speeds away?
It's crazy that even with the given assumptions, there's no blamn on her actions. I think that's telling about your bias.
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Doesn't matter. It may be a bad idea tactically, but it does not lose him his legal or moral right to self-defense. You can draw your gun when a bad guy has his gun trained on you, and I would consider that unlikely to stop the threat, but that doesn't mean you're not defending yourself.
Each shot is justified by the same reasons as the first one is justified because humans do not make decisions that quickly. We are talking about a time frame of 1 second. See my other reply here.
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Aside from your other misunderstandings of self defense law, standing in front of a stationary car is not recklessly putting yourself in a dangerous situation.
Things that are safe in the parking lot of a grocery store are not necessarily safe during the apprehension of a suspect. I have seen people argue here that we can not conclude from the fact that Good was a middle-aged woman who engaged in what appeared to prefer non-violent, if annoying and illegal actions to impede ICE that she was not going to suddenly to draw a gun to kill as many ICE officers as she could.
We know from the videos that Ross shooting her did very little to slow down her car. If she had aimed for him, even if he had managed to shoot her, he would have been severely injured.
So objectively speaking, standing too close to dodge in front of suspect's car is in fact reckless, even if you do not have reason to believe that that suspect might consider you Gestapo, or might be panicking or might be distracted and not even have seen you. This is why for example the CBP has explicit rules about not doing that.
I'd agree it's risky, but not reckless. People should generally be free to act under the assumption that someone will not try to murder them under any circumstance that they are not immediately threatening the lives of others. I have no interest in bending social convention to accommodate the homicidal.
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I strongly disagree that this is some symmetric tribal partisan thing (while agreeing with the premise that yes, many things boil down to that in the general case)
When I watch the videos, I don't jump to a firm position on "what was in the minds of both [parties]". Some things I'm unsure about:
So yeah, I haven't jumped to a strong conclusion about exactly what anyone was thinking in the moment. What I'm certain of is this:
That's instantly disqualifying. Nothing else needed; I'm not assuming anything about anyone's mindset. If you are a wearing a 1.5-ton suit of power armour with wheels, you cannot suddenly accelerate at another human being. You can't.
That's all it boils down to. It doesn't matter if you don't reach high speeds. If you hit him, there's a high chance he's going under. Given that he's close to the side of the car, he's probably going under the tires. So yeah, that's him dead. Even if he doesn't go under, you can pretty trivially die just from smashing your head on the ground. So whether or not it was a "good" shoot, was it acceptable for him to make the shot in the 1 second she gave him to decide how much he valued his life? Yes, absolutely.
So, I don't care whether she intended to run him over, or if (as I think is most likely) she wanted to get away, but considered knocking him over to be acceptably within the range of outcomes.
I'm not happy this happened. It's a tragedy. IIRC she had kids, which makes this more tragic -- unlike her, they played no part in creating this horrible outcome. But I won't lilypad from "it's a tragedy" to "anyone physically involved was in the wrong". She created this situation, and I wish she hadn't. "Do not drive forward when there's a person directly in front of you" is a simple, clear rule that would have kept everyone safe
I hope you don't think I'm a mindkilled Trump-loving lesbian-hater or whatever slamming my keyboard. This just doesn't seem like a tribal split thing; it's a case where actually, the truth of the matter has extremely strong video evidence, and one tribe chooses to ignore that. (I'll also note: each successive video smashes through a different set of anti-ICE excuses, e.g. "she was just a random bystander turning around!", "the wheels were never pointing at him", "he put himself in front of the vehicle!", "she was panicking!" etc -- there's no equivalent the other way.)
What is the truth you are so confident about? That she wasn't there accidentally? That she was trying to kill the ICE officer? That there was no misconduct or poor judgment? You're sure? Really, really sure? 100% sure?
You do seem to recognize the uncertaintiess, whether or not our conclusions are the same. (And you don't even know what why my conclusions are. Hell, right now I'm not sure what my conclusions are.)
My point is that I believe the majority of people commenting, and currently making earnest statements about how certain they are about the truth, would argue the exact opposite position, given the same evidence, if the tribal polarities were reversed.
In other words, everyone who says they are looking at the available video evidence to try to come to an informed conclusion--
I don't believe them*.
(FWIW, I mostly didn't believe anyone was even attempting to be honest during the Floyd and Rittenhouse cases either. I believe them even less now.)
(* "Them" meaning the vast majority. Not literally every single person with an opinion. Go ahead and assume you are an exception.)
I hope this isn't getting too recursive, but what do/did you think about the Rittenhouse case?
I'm reluctant to answer both because clearly you want to use it as a litmus test, and because I don't want to start a Rittenhouse subthread, but as I said at the time, I think he was a twerpy hero-wannabe who didn't need to be there, but in the situation he found himself in, he acted in self-defense.
I was legitimately just curious.
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meta comment: as a long-time lurker just commenting now, I'm generally a big fan of how you mod (and comment) -- given that I'm criticising/arguing with you, I should take a moment to say thanks for maintaining this space. It's valuable and good.
Meanwhile, in the fray:
I tried pretty hard to outline exactly what this was. There are bullet points for the features I was uncertain about, largely around their states of mind, and a single bullet point that was the single truth I'm confident of -- specifically, that she accelerated an SUV directly at another human being, and this is an act that can easily kill people.
I think I went overboard on making this clear -- idk how I could've laid it out in a way that would short-circuit this question.
No; no; no; no; no; no.
I specifically outlined "these are the things I'm uncertain of", "these are the things I'm certain of". What part of that makes you think "this is a person who thinks maximally ICEpilled chud takes, and needs to be deprogrammed"? I don't need to be introduced to the concept of less-than-100%-certainty, after a post in which (I'm pretty sure) I made a pretty clear attempt to delineate exactly which things I was confident in.
Though it's not directly relevant, here are my answers to your questions. I believe:
I don't think that was a fair line of implications to throw at me. I've tried to be pretty clear in what parts I'm confident in, and what parts are more ambiguous.
True! And that's fine. My conclusions don't depend on yours, or vice versa. I won't blame you for disagreeing/agreeing with me. Again, I'm just talking about what I saw in the actual physical pixels of the video, which show a person driving a 1.5-ton metal machine towards a fragile human body -- that's the point of my comment. Trying to do theory of mind on each other is overcomplicating things.
Yeah, I broadly agree that this is the state of society in general. I think the Motte, while susceptible to the same dynamic, is much much better (but still flawed! And we're all still human!)
Like, for me personally: I don't live in the US. ICE and US immigration are not directly applicable to me. I don't particularly like Trump, or Biden, or the Republicans, or the Democrats, etc etc. While I'm deeply frustrated with wokeness, I am actually capable of noticing situations where the stopped clock is right twice a day. (Tho even that phrasing is uncharitable, as a stopped clock is wrong by coincidence; occasionally, woke-type arguments are actually correct on their own merits).
You're not entirely wrong, it's just a bit too blackpilled for me to go "everyone is just choosing along tribal lines". Free to disagree, obviously; I just don't think this is the situation where that's the takeaway.
While recognising that you do a ton of work (and produce a ton of content) in the Motte, while I'm basically a newcomer outside of lurking -- dude, come on. I don't think anything I said calls for this kind of (mild) hostility.
I do not think I am some special butterfly. As I'm pretty sure my previous comment implies, and as the existence of the Motte might imply, I believe that there are plenty of people capable of determining their beliefs based on evidence and truth. (If not, what the heck is everyone doing here?)
As an easy example, check out quantumfreakonomic's comment (idk how to tag a user, sorry) concerning Ashley Babbit below, who seems to be the locus of discussion around a "flipped parity" shooting:
Based on a quick scan of quantum's other comments on this topic, that seems like an example of one person not dividing along tribal lines?
Well, ok, but then you're just going to be wrong about some people. You need a finer brush. Yes, many people aren't trying to come to an informed conclusion (probably most). But everyone? No, that's just wrong. And I think there's a real problem with trying to implicitly label objections to that as a claim to higher status ("go ahead and assume you are an exception"). People genuinely do differ, some people try harder than others, we are all fallible. If no one here is trying to find the truth -- which I strongly disagree with -- then idk the point of the Motte, exactly.
I don't. I didn't say that about you (nor have I "called out" anyone specifically). I specifically noted that you recognized the uncertainties (and I avoided getting into where I disagreed with you on specifics).
@ in front of their username.
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... is the rule here that we're allowed to call large swatches of people out as inconsistent without evidence, but just not search through someone's post history to show it for specific individuals who do have that evidence?
Are you disputing that broad swathes of people on both the right and the left are inconsistent, complaining that you think it's against the rules (or should be) to say broad swathes of people on both the right and the left are inconsistent, arguing that only one side is inconsistent and demanding evidence that the other side is also inconsistent, or just asking permission to try to gotcha someone?
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Gotta say this is a pretty shitty thing to hear from a mod. This is the Culture War thread. There's going to be politicized views and pre-existing bias brought in, sure. I think the Motte is one of the places were people do a pretty good job of laying their cards on the table up front. The effort-posts then do a great job of laying out various positions. To say generally, however, that they don't consider evidence is not only wrong but wronheaded - it demonstrates so mal intent.
My sense is that most (non-Blue Tribe) posters agree and concede that the video evidence here is not as exculpatory as the video evidence for Kyle Rittenhouse was. To me, this suggests that there is reasonable degree of nuance to the thinking here. I'm pretty sure that in Left-controlled spaces, people are just as sure that this shooter was in the wrong as they were about Kyle Rittenhouse.
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Mods are, in fact, allowed to have opinions about posters and posting quality, and while generally the caliber of discussion here is higher than most places on the Internet, you're kidding yourself if you think the same bad habits seen on reddit and X aren't also present here.
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C is impossible given this footage
She glances up twice. Once while backing up and a second time right before she starts driving forward. The first glance occurred while the police was quickly walking across the front of the car. Had the police officer kept walking, he would have been clear of the car when she stopped backing up. But while she's looking down, he stops right in front of her on the driver's side, which means she likely only knew where he was standing after looking up the second time and may not have expected anyone to be in the way.
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I wouldn't say impossible, see inattentional blindness. There are a lot of people driving cars that shouldn't be driving cars but do because you kind of need a car to get anywhere in most of the US.
It certainly doesn't help the side that wants to say she had absolutely no awareness, and does help the side that wants to argue she wanted to run him over intentionally. But also, this happens in a matter of seconds, and I'd think someone with the intention of trying to run over ICE with a car would've done it a different way, and invoking Occum's razor I think the answer that she was being wreckless, and a bad driver is more likely than she saw an opportunity to run over an ICE officer and made a split second decision to run him over.
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Come on man, surely you’ve seen leftists presenting a story like this: “Lady and her partner were on the way home from dropping off their kid at school. They make a wrong turn and completely accidentally end up in the middle of an ICE operation. Agents begin shouting confusing orders including “turn around.” Lady is panicked, tries to comply and do a 3 point turn, agent deliberately positions himself in front of her car and murders her.”
This is an extraordinarily popular narrative online and this convincingly debunks every one of those points. This isn’t some “two screens” rationalist bullshit, this is like Nicholas Sandmann, there is a straightforward lie and there is the truth.
You can still accept this video and say the shot was unjustified, but to say this doesn’t clarify anything just isn’t true
Yeah, in this situation the Leftists remind me of a defense attorney who reviews the evidence and, on behalf of his client, fabricates the most pro-client narrative that the evidence will permit.
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Yes, this is what happens when "My outgroup is evil" is straight up not allowed. When you can't just go "Well, they've lied about literally everything the last 15 years of my life... so I'm just going to assume the worst about them this time."
Obviously every narrative about this shooting from the left was going to be a lie. Did we already forget the cloud of bullshit they kicked up attempting to claim the Kirk shooter was MAGA? The weeks people spent here giving time to lies that were obvious immediately, irrefutable days later, and still trying to be "charitable" to obvious liars wondering in here weeks later from new accounts to discuss if Kirk's shooter was actually MAGA.
I'm reminded, ironically, of one of Sam Harris' criticisms of Donald Trump. Which is that, if he tells 1000 lies, just completely thoughtlessly, maybe 10 seconds per lie, and it takes you 2 hours to disprove each one... Donald Trump still wins because he wasted minutes of his life on the effort and you wasted days if not weeks or months.
So this is me weighing in finally. I don't understand why anybody even entertained a leftist narrative when the obvious reality is that this woman chose every step of this encounter, and fucked around and found out. She was not innocent, confused, wrong place wrong time, panicked, any of it. She's a brainwashed lesbian activist who thought she could run down an ICE agent because she's on the right side of history and Democrats have been telling her she can for years now. She doesn't deserve charity, the people creating fog of war do not deserve charity, evil actually exists no matter how much you claim it's against the rules to discuss.
To say nothing of Tim Walz having every appearance of being willing to cross the Rubicon because the Feds are finally going after his fraud kickbacks. Which is rich after having been beat over the head with "Insurrectionist" for 4 years.
There are no offramps or political solutions. It's between you, your God and your conscience your level of involvement in what's coming. I pray that keeping your head in the sand works out for most of you.
So let me ask you two genuine questions (and to forestall any objections or claims that I am trying to "bait" you-which I have never done, contrary to your repeated assertions- I swear that even if you take this opportunity to insult me in whatever fashion you wish, I grant you immunity):
Is it your genuine sincere belief that every single person identified as being "on the left" is an evil liar? That it's literally impossible for anyone to be a Democrat or a liberal and sincere and well-intentioned?
If we allowed some of those anti-MAGA posters who wander in to post like you do, would you be okay with that, or are you explicitly advocating we make the Motte a "leftists fuck-off" space?
Because the point of not allowing people to just post "My outgroup is evil" is not that no evil people exist or that you cannot believe your enemies are evil. The point is that if people just post how much they hate their enemies with no nuance, context, or argument, we will just have people screaming at each other and competing for who can sneer most dramatically - unless we are just all circle-jerking each other about who our enemies are.
As an actual literal statement the political left is committed to violating black letter constitutional civil rights protections that they justify by inventing human rights, yes, that's a very defensible statement. The adults in the room in the Biden admin(and there were some- not Biden and Kamala, but figures like Ron Klain and Merrick Garland were powerful enough on their own to count) were mostly moderate, establishment, center-left types and not crazy radicals and they... just let the country fall apart while they pursued failed attempts at political vengeance and power consolidation. The war on domestic terror was just full of oversteps that make no sense except as retribution against dissidents against state ideology, the novel legal theories, etc. Meanwhile actual competent governance was... not a priority. The null hypothesis for both a Biden admin and a vegetable in the white house is that technocrats from his own party run the country in a not-cartoonish manner with some featherbedding.
Trump talks about some of this stuff. But he doesn't actually do it.
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I think they do evil. I think at this point to be a Democrat is to be deeply committed to doing evil. The hills Democrats have chosen to die on (castrating children, giving billions in fraud to immigrants of questionable legality, forcing people to take experimental medications, mass censorship) are virtually unrecognizable from the Democrats of 30 years ago. All the good ones left the party and joined the Republican ticket. Which is probably why so many high ranking positions in Trump's administration got filled with former Democrats (RFK Jr, Tulsi).
I have in laws who are deeply committed Democrats, deeply committed to destroying the country. They don't think of it that way. They are hopelessly, and willfully, ignorant of the consequences of their policies. If "Evil" had a version of "without intent" like manslaughter, they'd be that. All the same...
If they were honest. I only care about honesty. They may view me as evil, for caring about my heritage, and wanting it to continue to exist. For not wanting billions of 3rd worlders enshittifying my homeland. For the very fact that my ancestors conquered this nation in the first place. And these are the exact reasons these differences can only be sorted out finally. I cannot exist in their world, and they cannot exist in mine. We are mutually evil to one another. I find their morality an abhorrent inversion of proper morals, and they feel the same. I can recognize this however, and accept that it's all over now but the violence. We cannot coexist.
But only if they are honest. If they stroll in here like Darwin of yore, playing Arguments as Soldiers, refusing to be pinned down, refusing to ever admit what the negative space around their rhetoric is gesturing towards, fuck em.
Which goes straight to it, and you see this over and over and over again. The leftist always calibrates their speech towards maximum fog of war. Among their own it's "Yes, I want to destroy the white race." but then in public it's "Oh why can't we have sympathy for the 65 IQ serial rapist an NGO imported from Africa? He just needs more restorative justice. That 3 year old probably won't even remember what happened to it." Which also goes straight to why LibsOfTiktok went so viral. These people just put all that nonsense out there, under their real ass names, employment in bio, and thought they were the victims when people outside their bubble saw it. Because, like Hillary Clinton famously said, sometimes you have two sets of opinions, a public set and a private set. It was an invasion of privacy to see their private opinions... even when they posted them publicly.
Do you believe your in-laws literally want you dead and your daughter transed?
I suspect not. (If you do- well, I don't know what to say except that must make things tense at Christmas.) This is the problem with such absolute statements.
Wrong question. People love to abstract evil away into mustache-twirling schemes to deliberately do harm, so they never have to face the evil in their own hearts. Evil isn't doing a "paperclip optimizer" routine, but for double mastectomies, it's convincing yourself your cause is so good, that you can, say, lie to promote / defend it because the chuds would """weaponize""" the truth.
What you want to ask in the case of his in-laws is, if his daughter said she's trans and he opposed it, would they hear him out, or write him off as a transphobe? Or for the "want him dead" part: if the cancel mob came after him, would they defend his character, or throw him under the bus (or for a borderline case: squirm like Alec Holowka's sister, hinting at the truth, but refusing to state it outright for fear of the mob going after her as well)?
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No, but they literally keep voting for local politicians who have that as their party platform. They just... I donno, refuse to grapple with that part of things.
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Declaring someone a mortal irreconcilable enemy provides them with the best possible reason to stop being honest with you, or trying. There is no honor to be won being honest with moral aliens.
Well yes. Thats another reason i hate my enemies. They don't even have the descency to admit it and have a fair fight. Its just gas lighting about their naked aggression 24/7.
What did you think being mortal enemies was? Essays? Vibes?
According to you, someone who you declared should literally be wiped out as the only reconciliation is supposed to be decent to you?
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I realize these questions are directed at someone else, but I feel like answering them:
Pretty much yes. It's become an evil ideology. People who adhere to evil ideologies are -- to a greater or lesser extent -- evil themselves.
I think that's a slightly different question, since, generally speaking, people are very good at self-deception. I think there are plenty of (evil) Leftists who genuinely and sincerely believe in the lies they spread and genuinely and sincerely believe that they are trying to make the world a better place.
Personally, I'm fine with Leftists posting here since (at least for now) they cannot engage in their usual tactics of shouting down their opposition; ideologically capturing the moderation team and abusing those powers to silence their adversaries; etc.
How are you defining "left"? By the standards of the Motte, I am on the left. (I'm more likely to vote Democrat than not, I don't like Trump, I think *-isms are bad, etc.) So does this make me "evil" or do I not count because I'm sufficiently gray? (Go ahead and call me evil if you insist, I am genuinely trying to figure out how you are modeling other minds.)
Okay, but that necessarily means we don't let you shout them down either.
That's a complicated question, because in many ways Leftism is not a specific set of beliefs but rather a process by which people compete for social status and power by pretending to be morally superior by making use of what Larry Auster called the "liberal script." But here's a rough and ready definition for you: If you could unironically put one of those signs in your front yard which says "In this house we believe," then it is highly likely you are a Leftist. I haven't paid specific attention to your posts so I don't know if I would call you a Leftist.
That's fine with me. For the most part, the positions espoused by Leftism can't really stand up to fair scrutiny. In the absence of underhanded tactics, Leftism will lose.
I definitely would not put one of those signs in my yard. But I know who people who would and do, and while they make me cringe, they are not evil.
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Yes, I have seen that narrative. "Good was there accidentally" I guess is arguably included in option (f) but I considered it unlikely. Even taking it as a given that she was there intentionally, my point stands.
People here considered it, and I'm pretty sure that poster even did so in good faith. Of your own proposals, the video seems to at least significantly reduce the possibility of b and c.
I'm not going to say anything with confidence yet -- we don't even have confirmation this is real video! -- but there's a long distance between 'absolute 100% proof' and not 'particularly clarifying'.
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